LOLWUT? “I Can Has Cheezburger” can has its own TV show

LOLWork: "The less hair a cat has, the more likely you are to see its genitals.”

This Wednesday evening, once electoral politics have settled down, those who adore lovable kittehz on the Interwebz will finally have a Bravo-made reality TV show to watch. (OK, you can actually watch the pilot right now on Hulu.)

LOLwork documents the lives of Cheezburger, the Seattle geek team that capitalized on the LOLcats meme.

The pilot episode opens with a discussion of whether a cat that looks like it’s dead can be used on the site—short answer: no. Cut to a morning meeting evaluating a few photos, and commentary from the site’s users that there isn't enough variety among cat breeds on the site, including hairless cats.

That, in turn, prompted this from Will Sharick, a content manager at the site: “The less hair a cat has, the more likely you are to see its genitals.” (That was the only line in the show that made me laugh, nay, guffaw!)

The conference (which lasts about a minute or two) yields a “surprise team-building” meeting with a video production competition for the site (perhaps contrived for the Bravo show). In a few short minutes through some tight editing and time-lapsed photography, the Cheezburger team, paired up with co-workers that seem to not actually like each other, is transformed into all kinds of human drama.

Ben Huh, the company’s CEO and founder, comes across as smart, but semi-detached for the entire episode: there is more than one brief background shot of him working on his treadmill standing desk.

The New York Times summarized the show as having a “depressed, workaday vibe,” but still declared it to be “superior” to Bravo's other tech-reality show: “Start-Ups: Silicon Valley.” (That debuts Monday night.) GeekWirepanned the premiere: “I just don’t see LOLWork having the chops to translate into TV-speak for a bitchy Bravo audience.”

How would I summarize the pilot of LOLWork? I’m not really a fan of reality TV to begin with, so I was skeptical to start. The first episode wasn't enough to really make me—even as someone who already has a passing familiarity with LOLspeak—want to keep watching.

lolcats are good because they are quick, to the point, and cats. Also lolcats (and all funny pictures) are a very.. granular form of entertainment. You can look at as many or as few as you want. That's kind of the opposite of a tv show.

Crap shows like this is why I've deleted Bravo from showing up in my channel list. Unfortunately as a paying cable subscriber they are getting my money anyway. Pretty much everything on that channel panders to people acting like assholes or idiots or both and being famous for it.

1.) Cheap to produce <---- part I understand2.) Popular <----- part I don't understand

Those aspects feed into each other. Reality shows are popular, but with relatively small audiences. It's probably much easier to saturate the market with a dozen shows that appeal to 10% of the market rather than with a few blockbusters. (Shermans vs. Panzers again...) And the cost of failure is important: if a network can quickly launch new experiments easily, it can maintain that saturation.

It's the opposite model of the music business: instead of a handful of artists dominating with carefully formulated top-ten songs, you've got a continuous procession of nobodies.

Well there's a meme finally consigned to the trash heap. When the PHP (Pointy-Haired-Producer--TV equivalent to PHB) discovers the Internet meme, its time to take out the trash. I guess the next will be Gangnam competitions or talking dogs (sorry Mischa).

...Those aspects feed into each other. Reality shows are popular, but with relatively small audiences. It's probably much easier to saturate the market with a dozen shows that appeal to 10% of the market rather than with a few blockbusters. (Shermans vs. Panzers again...) And the cost of failure is important: if a network can quickly launch new experiments easily, it can maintain that saturation....

Um, I think you mean "T-34s vs. Tiger's" (60,000 vs. 1200 total, the Battle of Kursk, and all that then...). Sorry, I'm a tank snob.

Good for them getting a show, but to me, cheezburger is over. LOLcats went too much into LOLspeak (comments section being a lost cause), fails stopped failing, motivationals stopped being funny, "there I fixed it" became mundane, and graphs became too boring and too depressing.

If this show doesn't work out shoot me a line, I have a nice collection of O RLY? pictures and some AYBABTU swf files that you could probably turn into a really awesome show!

Lots of memes out there. How about a show with colorful ponies that... oh, wait...

praetor_alpha wrote:

LOLcats went too much into LOLspeak (comments section being a lost cause), fails stopped failing, motivationals stopped being funny, "there I fixed it" became mundane, and graphs became too boring and too depressing.

I was driven away by the increasing editorial/politcial slant in the non-political sections. I looked at kittehs to get away from that crap. I'd rather read Dolan comics than Pundit Kitchen. Failbook is still amusing, probably because it's not user generated captions.